New Hampshire native Jennifer Simard brings trademark deadpan to Tony-nominated run in ‘Death Becomes Her'

Boston Globe

3 days ago

But thanks to a magic potion that grants her eternal youth, Helen gets a gorgeous glow-up and embarks on a quest of vengeance against her rival.
When Madeline strikes the same Faustian bargain for immortality, the ladies engage in an unhinged war of brutal insults and bodily destruction involving shovels, shotguns, and more.
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Jennifer Simard
Courtesy
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For years, Simard has been beloved by theater insiders for her ability to achieve a big impact with a small but electrifying gesture, slight turn of the head, or strange vocal intonation. That talent is on full display in 'Death Becomes Her' when her character, forced into a mental institution, chews on her 'yummy hair' as visions of her frenemy haunt her addled mind; when the unhinged Helen seduces Ernest with a double entendre-laden song while plotting Madeline's demise. Or perhaps most notoriously, when she's waving away smoke from a gunshot wound to the gut while snarking,
Whether she's giving a sarcastic eye-roll, tossing off an acerbic zinger, or seducing with a come-hither stare, Simard intimately understands the art of underplaying. 'It's almost like an experiment. How small can I be to achieve the same result? Sometimes you just have to say the words and not put a lot of frosting on it,' Simard says in a recent Zoom interview from her dressing room at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. 'I always believe in letting the audience come to you, as opposed to pushing. Less is more, so that when you have to paint with a broad brush stroke, it's coming from an honest place that you've already used a fine brush stroke for.'
Raves Noel Carey, who co-wrote the music and lyrics for 'Death Becomes Her' with Julia Mattison, 'Jen can get huge laughs with one word set at half volume. … She does a really good job of putting the cap on the crazy and letting it boil. But you can see [Helen's] conniving wheels turning.'
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Megan Hilty, left, and Jennifer Simard, right, in "Death Becomes Her."
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman/Matthew Murphy
'Death Becomes Her' might be a combination of an uproarious camp sensibility and the grotesquely macabre, but it also contains incisive social critiques — of impossible beauty standards for women, the difficulties of aging, and the lengths people will go to maintain their youthful looks. 'You have a double standard quite often,' Simard says. 'I don't know how many times I've read, 'Wow, she's really let herself go,' and then other people saying, 'Oh, she's had too much work done.''
So Simard takes Helen's fears and insecurities seriously.
'I believe the best comedy is rooted in pain, and Helen has a lot of pain,' Simard says, 'and you can just mine so much humor from that.'
In time, the two frenemies realize that they're each other's 'persons,' the yin to their rival's yang. 'These two women don't hate each other,' Simard explains. 'The other woman makes them feel alive, and that's what we discover by the end. It's disguised as this all-out war, but really they just can't live without one another.'
Growing up in New Hampshire, just outside of Nashua, Simard performed in musicals in high school and at dinner theaters and regularly attended shows both in Boston and at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. As a little kid, she remembers sitting in the front row at
'Fiddler on the Roof,' tugging on her mother's sleeve, pointing to Tevye's youngest daughter and saying, 'Mom, I don't want to be down here. I want to be up there [on stage],' she says. 'So I knew from a very young age that's what I wanted to do.'
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She attended the
Boston Conservatory for a semester, but dropped out when she started landing professional gigs, including a season at Boston's now-defunct outdoor Publick Theatre and a production of 'Nunsense' in the North End.
Then she landed a job in the venerable musical-theater parody show 'Forbidden Broadway,' moved to New York, and never looked back. Spoofing Broadway stars and belting big numbers in 'Forbidden Broadway' and performing in the original cast of the long-running 'I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change' was ideal training ground for how to ring laughs out of every moment.
'She's game for anything,' says
While Simard had appeared on Broadway in shows like 'Shrek: The Musical' and 'Sister Act' and was beloved by in-the-know fans, it took years of struggling against the tide for her to finally break through to wider acclaim as gambling-addict Sister Mary Downey in 'Disaster!' She earned a Tony nomination for her antic performance, and it led to higher-profile parts in 'Hello, Dolly,' 'Company,' and 'Mean Girls.'
'I don't think anything else I've done subsequently would've happened without it,' she says. 'It put me on a different level — or section of a map.'
Simard credits her New England roots for teaching her how to persevere against all odds — 'the industrial Northeast, baby, we're pretty tough' — and her late mother, Yvette, for inspiring her 'devious' and cracked sense of humor. 'She was the funny one,' she says.
'Any humor I have is pretty much through her.'
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Right now, she's basking in that sweet-spot combination of a role that's 'creatively satisfying' in 'a commercial hit that people are clamoring to see. … You just don't take that for granted because it's rare, if it ever happens.'
She's also savoring her Tony nomination, which she says epitomized her 'resilience' at a difficult time. 'I've been through a lot in my personal life in the last two years,' she says. After two decades of marriage, 'I've had to navigate a divorce and, like Helen, lean on my best friend — my person. … So to get this recognition now is really special.'